Scripture readings:
Revelation 21:1-7, 9-14 & 22:1-5; Luke 23:32-43
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| A couple Photos Around My Yard: March 2015 |
There was a young pastor who had just completed
seminary and he found himself officiating at his first funeral. His congregation
was in a small farming town with lots of orchards, and he wanted to relate his
words to his new community. As he stood by the grave, this is what he said:
“What we lay to rest in this place is only the shell of the one we knew so
well. We have the shell, but the nut has gone.”
Jesus said this to the criminal being crucified
beside him: “I tell you the truth, today you will be with me in paradise.”
(NIV)
That criminal had to be surprised by what Jesus said,
and even confused. He would have been surprised and confused and somehow
comforted by the grace and the love that he found in Jesus’ words. He knew that
he didn’t deserve anything that he heard and found in Jesus.
He could also have been surprised and confused by the
words “today” and “paradise” going side by side.
The Jews commonly believed that, in the period
between one’s death and the resurrection, the soul lived in a state of waiting:
waiting for God to work, waiting for the resurrection to come, waiting for
paradise.
The Jewish people have never come to a single idea
about what happens to a person immediately after death. Christians have
sometimes come to similar different conclusions: waiting or arriving, or a
little bit of both.
What shocked and confused the sorry criminal was that
Jesus seemed to say that they were not going to be resurrected into paradise
someday in the future. There would be no waiting for the great things to begin.
They were going to die their way into paradise today.
The sorry criminal who asked Jesus to remember him
was surprised and confused when Jesus put the words “today” and “paradise”
together, because Jesus was giving him more and better than he had asked for:
more than he dared to hope for, more than he dared to believe.
I believe that this is how God works. I trust that,
in Christ, God gives us more and better than we dare, more than we hope, more
than we believe, and more than we ask. This is typical of the God revealed in
the Bible.
The word paradise is not a common Bible word, but it
is a common Bible thing. It belongs to a whole group of words that mean
“garden”. Especially the word paradise meant the king’s garden. The paradise
was the place where the king could simply be himself with his family and his
friends. Paradises were places of peace, and friendship, and intimacy.
There was just such a garden at the beginning of the
Bible. That paradise was called Eden Eden
There is also a paradise at the end of the Bible. It
is called “the Holy
City Paradise is another
word for home.
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| Church Yard: March 2015 |
In the ancient world, a paradise was one of the
nicest of the king’s living spaces, but it wasn’t just nice to look at. It was
a fruitful garden. It had trees, and fruit, and water. It had nourishment and
beauty.
The New Jerusalem also belongs to God. It is designed
to be the ideal home place of the human race: the human race reborn in Jesus.
In Jesus we find ourselves in the garden of nourishment and beauty. In Christ
we belong to the home place of forgiveness and grace. We belong to the home
place of healing and the wiping away of tears, the place where death stops and
life is received.
Paul talks about our being at home in his Second
Letter to the Corinthians, in the fifth chapter. It starts out this way: “Now
we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building
from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands.” (5:1) And then
he says, beginning in verse six: “Therefore we are always confident and know
that as long as we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord. We live
by faith, not by sight. We are confident, I say, and would prefer to be away
from the body and at home with the Lord. So we make it our goal to please him,
whether we are at home in the body or away from it.” (5:6-9)
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| Photos Taken around White Bluffs, Columbia River March 2015 |
Now home may be the place where we sleep but, much
more than that, home is the place where we live; where we are truly and fully
ourselves and alive. Paul uses the idea of being at home in the body to
describe being physically alive in this world. When our bodies are healthy and
well we are at home in them, and we are truly and fully ourselves in our
bodies.
And then Paul says that we can be away from our bodies
and at home with the Lord. This means that, when we are not alive physically in
this world, we are living with God. We are at home, and truly and fully
ourselves.
To be at home in the body is a fruitful and beautiful
place to be. To be at home with the Lord, away from the body, is also a
fruitful and beautiful place to be. It is like paradise.
The Book of Revelation shows paradise coming from
heaven to earth, at a future time when the judgment of God has come, and the
living and the dead are brought together in the resurrection, and heaven and
earth are made new. Paradise is described as a
city, and it is described as a garden, and it is described as the Bride of
Christ, the Bride of the Lamb.
In the Old Testament, God’s people, in the form of Israel
So, in some way, paradise is not a place.
We are talking about things beyond our understanding;
but if God is beyond our understanding, and if he loves us, and wants to share
himself with us, then God will have to take us to a place, or an experience,
beyond our understanding.
I mean who can understand “streets of gold as clear
as crystal”? And how could we ever really want such a thing?
Our ability to understand the joys of heaven is like
the ability of a four-year-old child to understand the joy and glory of a
honeymoon. A four-year-old went to a cousin’s wedding and, at the reception, he
heard all the talk and the jokes about the honeymoon, and he was confused by
what he heard. He wondered what it was all about. So he asked his Dad.
His Dad carefully did his best. He said, “Son, when
you grow up, if you get married, your honeymoon will be one of the happiest
times of your life.” “Will I be able to take my toy dinosaurs along?”
“Uh…no…you probably won’t take your dinosaurs on your honeymoon. But you’ll
still have a great time.” “Then can my friend Jeffery come with me on my
honeymoon?” “No, Jeffery won’t come.” “Then I don’t know if I want to go on a
honeymoon, Daddy. It doesn’t sound like much fun to me.” (“1001 More Humorous
Illustrations”, Michael Hodgin, #566)
To say that paradise, in heaven and in the
resurrection, is the best of all homes is comforting because it enables us to
imagine heaven as being full of comfortable things; but gold, and jewels, and
blazing light, and thrones, and crowns are not comfortable things at all. It’s
just the opposite!
It doesn’t mean that heaven is full of metal, and
gems, and uncomfortable chairs and hats. It means that paradise is full of glory.
We can use the most priceless things in the world to describe glory, but that
doesn’t mean that those priceless things are the glory.
Remember that paradise is us in the presence of God. Paradise is a relationship. Paradise
is a network of people and God. It is the gathering of all God’s people who
have ever lived or ever will live. In Revelation, John tells us that we will
shine with the glory of God.
Imagine glory being the clothing of God. Think of
what it’s like for a little girl to dress in her mother’s dress, or for a boy
to wear his dad’s boots: to be dressed in their parent’s glory. They shine with
their parents’ glory.
Or think of a small child singing in a Christmas
program, or riding a two-wheeler for the first time, with their mom and dad
watching. They are shining. They are all in their glory, but there is nothing
egotistical, or proud, or unnatural about that glory. They are full of glory
because their parents are full of pleasure in them. It is priceless. It is all
gold, and jewels, and thrones, and crowns, and so much more.
That is glory. That is what the gold, and the jewels,
and the thrones, and the crowns are about.
A lot of our life, in the present, is about the
process of learning. We learn what our limits are. We learn what we can do and
cannot do. Or (as we get older) we learn what we can’t do anymore. Life is a
lot about learning to avoid what doesn’t give other people pleasure, but
paradise is different.
A toddler walks because someone who loves them is
holding out arms of love and strength to them, and beaming with pride and joy.
Glory, for us, will be a life of what we can do because we see the pleasure
that God takes in us and in what we do, because we see him there reaching out
to us. That is glory.
There are walls around the paradise at the end of the
Bible. I really don’t like walls except as places to put bookshelves.
Otherwise, walls are not comfortable except as shelter. In paradise we won’t
need shelter.
Then there is privacy. Walls are comfortable because
they give us privacy but, in so many ways, we need privacy because we need to
shut other people out. Walls keep others from seeing and knowing too much. We
have reasons for wanting to do this. Maybe in paradise we will be so changed
that there will be no reason for us to shut other people out.
Sometimes I have thought that the walls around
paradise, in the Book of Revelation were about safety, but the gates of the
city are always open, so safety is not the issue. We will be completely safe,
beyond our comprehension. The glory of paradise is that there will be no more
fear. There will be nothing to fear.
The enemies outside the walls are not to be feared
any more. The enemies at the end of the Book of Revelation will not come in the
open gates, no matter how wide open they are, no matter how long they are open.
And so the enemies must not want to come in. But for us the walls are about
coming in.
For us, a lot of life is about going out, letting go,
leaving behind. But paradise is about coming in. It’s about people and pleasures
coming together instead of pulling apart. Paradise
is about hellos and not goodbyes. Paradise is
that kind of good home place.
The sorry criminal on the right side of Jesus looked
his own life in the face. He saw himself from the point of view of his own
cross.
He firmly believed that he deserved to die there. He
was getting what he deserved. That is what he said. It was right and fitting: a
horrible thought.
Then he said to Jesus, “Jesus, remember me when you
come into your kingdom.” He didn’t mean, “Think about me once in a while.” The
word “remember,” in the Bible means to take action about something. To remember
the Sabbath meant to make the Sabbath happen. For us it means to make a day of
rest and worship happen. The thief was saying, “Act upon me. Deal with me. Take
up my case.”
The criminal knew that his own cross was his proper
fate. His life had been the sort of life that deserved that sort of death. He
saw himself as he was. There was nothing he could do about it.
Then he looked at Jesus, and Jesus seemed like a king
to him, even dying there on the cross. He saw glory.
Maybe Jesus would look at him and see that something
else was right for him; and Jesus could do something about it. After all,
didn’t he just hear Jesus say, “Father ,
forgive them for they know not what they are doing?”
Where evil, and sin, and suffering, and punishment,
and death seemed the strongest, the sorry soul heard the message of
forgiveness. He put his trust in Jesus because of that forgiveness. He also put
his trust in Jesus because something told him that Jesus had the power to do
something about his life and deal with it, even while he died on the cross.
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| Sunset, Desert Aire-Mattawa, WA: March 2015 |
Forgiveness begins for us at the cross. Heaven also
begins for us at the cross. In that way, we can say that forgiveness and heaven
have begun, for us, today. They have begun for us now, on the cross.
Jesus said as much. Jesus looked at the thief and
Jesus saw that paradise, today, was the right place for that sorry soul. Here,
beside him, was a person who would thrive on grace. Here was someone who would
love to come in and come home, at last and forever, and hear Jesus say, “Well
done! I am pleased with you.”
That is glory. That is paradise. That is what we find
in Jesus.
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